Search and discovery are critical and integral parts in the today's business information processing. A discovery services (DS) is needed to facilitate finding of information resources in a computer network for particular problems, questions, or even items. Examples of general purpose DS providers are Domain Name System (DNS) service and various Internet search engines. However, there are DS providers aimed to satisfy more specific needs. For example, in a supply chain, a DS would provide references to data for given products or vendors.
Typically, DSs supply references to information resources in a computer network in response to search requests. The search requests contain identification information associated with the required information resources. In the era of globalized economy, DS are especially needed in the public networks, e.g. the Internet. An entity, who wants to avail information resources to third parties, must entrust a DS provider with the respective discovery information, comprising identification information and corresponding references to information resources. Accordingly, the DS provider publishes this information in the public network.
In many cases, the entities that entrust discovery information require from public DS services to control the access to this information. The discovery information, together with some contextual data (e.g. time of publication, number of requests, publisher and requestor network addresses, etc.) can infer sensitive data like business relationships, trade volumes, turnover trends, etc. This fact renders the public DS providers an attractive target for data theft attacks. Furthermore, public DS are susceptible to scalability, availability, and performance problems.